The goal is simple. Destroy all the teapots before they can kill your small fleet of ships.
It starts out easy to find teapots to destroy. However as there become fewer teapots in existence, it is harder to find the remaining ones. For that reason, we have added a 3D radar to locate those last targets.
Teapots Game with Radar
When flying, if we turn right or left and mix that with up and down, the claw ship winds up banking to get where you're going. Or if you press the up or down key continually, you can flip right over into a loop de loop. Either of these conditions can leave you disoriented. If you stop active steering for a short while, internal gyroscopes will get you back to level flight.
Note: When pressing the trigger, charges will fly away from the ship in a straight line. If you are spinning the ship, the charges may appear to curve, but this is only an illusion. If we had a top down view of our world, you would see that the charges really do fly straight at what they are pointed at.
I consider the beta version of a program to be beta quality when it is feature complete. This version is pre-beta (which sounds better than alpha) because there are still a few items missing that i think are necessary to the game. These will be added shortly.
Necessary
Right now, when playing Teapots you are invincible because the teapots cannot fire back at you. This is the very next feature to be added. At that point the game will be considered beta.
Nice to Have
There are a few other features i want to add before we put this out in public: The ship has been designed to have animation as it moves around. I would like to get that added.
Radar has also been designed to add animation that will aid in indicating if teapots are in front or in back of the player's ship.
For each play session, we keep track of the high score. We need to add persistent storage so that high score can be maintained between game sessions.
That will probably be as far as we can go with this WebGL version of Teapots. For the next builds we will probably need to have devices.
Going Mobile
The eventual goal is to have this game available on mobile devices, mostly iPhones and Android hardware. We will not require adding a physical keyboard for game play. Instead, we could add onscreen controls. However, it is more likely we will replace the movement controls with sensing the accelerometers. I have found on the KBot Control Program that i can get nice, smooth control by tilting the game device. This would probaly be the point in development where we would build for iOS and Android, and place them on the App Store and Google Play.
Long Term
We really want to build virtual reality versions of our game. Probably the first target will be for Oculus because it the most affordable of the 3D devices still under development. (I won't rule out other 3D viewers, but have no plans for them yet.) At a recent Unity program, it was pointed out that the very cheapest methods of playing virtual reality is with Cardboard and Daydream. Even though Google is no longer developing for them, the viewers are still around, so we may build versions available for them.
Ultimate
After we have all the elements of a virtual reality version of the Teapots game, we will add a whole new game into the mix, Tempest. Then we really will have a Tempest in a Teapot.